On Berlin's Adalbertstrasse, Clue, a female physiology app, has just moved to a new home. At 5:30 in the evening, this 400 square meter office was almost empty-except for programmers. "We just need to work between 10:00-16:30," said Lisa Kennelly, director of marketing at Clue. "Except for programmers. They may work late at night, you know sometimes they are as writers, Writing code at night will be more inspirational. "
The programmer of the food delivery company FoodPanda only left after work at about 7 o'clock. The next day was a three-day public holiday in Germany. They were the last group of people in the office to leave, apart from customer service. And most people plan to pack home at around 4pm.
Only programmers seem to be as busy as their peers outside Europe. They spend 10-12 hours a day at work. There are often two or three screens in front of them. One screen is a code editor. The other screen is often the interface of the corporate collaboration software Slack or Trello. This is the most popular collaboration among startups. tool. Because you need to use the keyboard all the time, programmers often have mechanical keyboards on their desktops. Some people put their computers and screens on stands, while others stand in the office.
But even with such long hours, almost every startup company still thinks that the supply of programmers cannot keep up with the company's vision.
For the convenience of programmers, Clue just renovated the new office. The specially set up a laboratory for testing. The mobile phones used for testing will be arranged in a row on the solid wood shelf. The programmers will have them at hand. It's like that in the shop, "Kennelly said.
This is a good way to improve efficiency. However, what really matters is that you have to find a way to recruit more programmers-there are always so few suitable teams in these startup companies, at least they all think so. On BerlinStartupJobs, Berlin's local recruitment site, the number one category is always developers, and the number of open positions is almost double that of the number two market person.
"The lack of a programmer" is the case all over the world. According to statistics from The App Association (ACT), more than 220,000 programmer jobs are open across the United States. And across Europe, a digital economy report from the European Union states that by 2020 there will be approximately 800,000 programmers whose needs will not be met.
The vacancies for programmer positions are showing that this already "slow" Europe is trying to solve the problems of stagnation in development after the financial crisis, the loss of large manufacturing companies and rising unemployment rates through entrepreneurship and technology exports.
"Programmers are almost part of the local economy." Jonathan Godfrey, ACT's vice president of public affairs, said in a research report.
Find job in Europe
Leave the decision to the programmer
Although there is no world technology center like Silicon Valley, there are not many programmers in Europe. According to statistics from data analysis company IDC in 2014, the number of programmers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa accounted for 39% of the world's total, which was about 4.29 million.
At the same time, there is a general consensus in Europe that hiring programmers is not easy. Silicon Valley is digging a lot of people from Europe, and big startups are opening up more competitive conditions. Honeypot, a programmer recruitment site in Berlin, has likewise opened its posts to countries outside Europe, with 30% of registered programmers coming from outside Europe, and many from Brazil, India, and Egypt. Founder and CEO Kaya Taner said, "We want to leave the decision to programmers-because demand is greater than supply."
Programmers looking for jobs on Honeypot from Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia
The rapid growth of technology startups like Clue over the past two years has attracted more programmers to move here, but the rate of increase of local programmers does not necessarily keep up with the rise of startups, which is almost the same as China. Today, in cities known as startups such as London, Berlin, and Amsterdam, startups can be found in all parts of the city: incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces, and even street cafes. jobs. In the first quarter of 2016, bets on European startups have broken records. Venture capital from European startups has increased by 60% in the past year.
In Berlin, there are already some startup companies growing up, such as e-commerce platform Zalando SE, map application Here, incubator Rocket Internet, and delivery company Delivery Hero. When Zalando went public in October 2014, it was already the largest technology stock IPO (initial public offering) in Europe since 2000.
30 most highly valued startups in Germany
A special fact that belongs to Europe is that European startups have received more venture capital over the past year, but more than half are early investments under $ 5 million. Large startups such as Uber and Airbnb, which are valued at tens of billions of dollars, have not yet appeared. Currently, there are only 47 "unicorn" companies with a valuation of more than the US $ 1 billion across Europe, and the average valuation of these companies is the US $ 2.8 billion. According to the British Investment Bank GP Bullhound's 2016 European Technology Unicorn Report, the valuation of unicorns in Europe is not as high as in the United States. The valuation/revenue ratio of these companies is about 18 times. The company's average valuation is 46 times revenue.
Some have argued that the fragmented small markets in Europe are the reason why startups have difficulty forming a scale in Europe. At a mobile conference in Brussels last month, Andrus Ansip, vice-president of the European Commission, expressed this view, and today there is no huge unified market with 500 million users in Europe. Andrews Ansip is worried because he is responsible for the EU's digital unified market.
Unemployment rates in Europe have fallen since 2013
Europe has shown a lot of determination, at least they have no intention of tying today's technology start-up centers to the core areas of the manufacturing industry in the past, and to digest the heritage rigidly. In Germany, Berlin has become a new alternative to the relatively complete traditional industrial and financial cities of Munich, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. It has only become the center of startups in the last 10-15 years. It also means that most of the creativity and technology All come together here.
In Berlin, foreigners from 190 countries live, and more than 600,000 immigrants already make up 18% of Berlin's population. The largest number of immigrants came from Poland, Turkey, and Russia.
In these "new cities," small startups are less concerned about the future and big companies. "The roadmap for technological development is led by big companies like Google, Facebook, and Alibaba. What we do is adapt ourselves to these platforms," said Victor Knaap, founder of Dutch digital creative company Media Monks.
In order to adapt to these platforms, technicians are therefore particularly important. Programmers have become the only role that startups cannot afford to leave.
The clue is a company with 36 people, more than half of whom are product and technical teams. When it was founded five years ago, in addition to the founders and couples, the iOS development engineer was the first employee. It wasn't until Kennelly came to Berlin from Silicon Valley two and a half years ago that Clue had someone dedicated to market, content, and growth.
Takeaway company FoodPanda bought 11 takeaway platform companies, which helped them quickly expand to 35 countries. They spend a lot of money to include these platforms in their judgment criteria: "awesome platform, good technology", and help them quickly enter a new market.
Even manufacturing companies have become irrelevant to programmers. Almost all Scandinavian furniture manufacturing companies went online from the very beginning (the earliest probably 10 years ago). Reform, a Copenhagen-based cabinetry company, believes that investors need to look more like an Internet company to get investors interested, "because they are used to the rapid data changes of IT companies." To this end, programmers are trying to optimize the process for consumers to choose a design solution on the network.
How does a programmer work?
It doesn't make much difference whether you meet programmers at the mobile application company Blinkist or those outsourcing tasks in the coworking space Betahaus. They generally do not use the keyboards provided by the company, but instead, use their own set of mechanical keyboards and mice. There is no difference between Berlin and San Francisco.
But a change is happening and freelancers among programmers are increasing.
Ko.lek.tiv is a technology outsourcing company in Poland. Three of the four are programmers, and the remaining one is responsible for the design, marketing, promotion, and customer contact. These programmers can serve several customers at the same time, temporarily solving the problem of insufficient programmer supply on the market. "We don't make our own products at all, we just work for customers, from user experience, software to later marketing." Michal Kanila said.
In Berlin, Kanila's most frequented place is the co-working space Betahaus, where he rents out office space and is also looking for customers here. "There are a lot of potential customers here. If you look around, a lot of people need help." At the breakfast event held by Betahaus every Wednesday, Kanila was one of the most active participants in the audience.
Another frequent visitor to Betahaus is David Bayly, with silver hair and a beard. David Bayly, 68, started his career as a programmer in 1972. After serving as the CTO and CEO of several companies, he came to Berlin from Australia a year ago, became a freelance programmer, and also worked as a consultant for the previous company. Bayly lives on the other side of the city, but every Wednesday he goes to the co-working space Betahaus for breakfast.
A Japanese programmer sat in Betahaus from 8am onwards to start coding. He was also the type who took outsourcing work. After the event, he soon decided to rent a place to start work.
Foreign technicians have helped expand the scale of entrepreneurship in European cities. Programmer recruitment site Honeypot counted the CTOs of 58 startups in Berlin and found that 60% were not German. 7% of CTOs are from the United States. They are better at using technology to enlarge the company ’s name. It is not groundless. The market value of 7% of CTO's companies together accounts for 34% of the total. The least work experience among them is 4 Years, the average working life has reached 12 years.
However, it is not easy to find them and convince them to move to cities outside Silicon Valley. Founder Kaya Taner encountered such difficulties when he was the CEO of the mobile advertising company AppLift. The human resources leader or founder of a startup needs to personally send thousands of contact information on LinkedIn in order to get a response. What's more, "When you sent the invitation, you didn't know whether he was looking for a job, what the expected salary was, and whether he was willing to move to Hamburg or Berlin for a company."
Subsequently, Kaya Taner founded Honeypot in Berlin, and now more than 30% of the registered users of this company are programmers from outside Europe, which is a recent Internet celebrity company. Honeypot, a new platform created specifically for programmers, not only refers to programmer resources with the literal meaning "honeypot", but it also implies a layer that only programmers can understand-honeypot technology is also a This kind of network security technology tricks hackers to attack the system through a carefully constructed camouflage system.
Because demand is far greater than supply, programmers at any level have demand. "Advanced or elementary doesn't matter," Kaya Taner said. As with the size of startups, the 125 companies registered with Honeypot range from 10 to 1,000 people.
European cities with the same demand are increasing year by year. Honeypot's business started in Berlin and gradually expanded to cities such as Hamburg, Munich, and Amsterdam. They also rented an office on the street corner and added a free visa support service for programmers outside the EU. There are 17 talent commissioners there who can answer almost all questions for immigrant programmers.
Where do programmers come from?
People want to solve the problem of insufficient supply of talents through different methods. When a city eagerly hopes to activate itself through entrepreneurship, it will almost encounter this problem.
StartupAmsterdam is a non-governmental public agency belonging to the city of Amsterdam. It was founded a year and a half ago by the Amsterdam government, large companies, and Amsterdam Marketing.
On StartupAmsterdam's website, they list 15 ways to promote Amsterdam's "entrepreneurial ecosystem", and talent is the first of these. One way is for the government to provide work visa support for startups, as well as a tax exemption for talent introduction. "The Netherlands is a small country, and our startups are not enough to recruit people locally. They need to attract engineers from abroad." Said Josephine Meijer, who is responsible for StartupAmsterdam marketing and communications.
However, this is not the only way. Over the past year, the five-person team has also set up a special fund to advance programming projects in elementary and middle school curricula.
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